Talented Callaway Sisters Sparkle in ‘Sibling Revelry’

The best cabaret show to arrive in the Southland in recent memory opened Tuesday night before a packed house at the Cinegrill in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

It’s called “Sibling Revelry,” and it features sisters Ann Hampton Callaway and Liz Callaway in a program that is as musically brilliant as it is flat-out entertaining.

The sisters Callaway are both gifted artists. Ann is a cabaret perennial with some solid jazz credentials (on her latest CD, “To Ella With Love,” she is accompanied by Wynton Marsalis, Cyrus Chestnut and Christian McBride), as well as a talented songwriter. She sings and performs her original theme music for the CBS sitcom “The Nanny,” and her lovely song “At the Same Time” will be featured on Barbra Streisand’s next album.

Liz, primarily active on Broadway, has a Tony nomination (for the 1984 musical “Baby”), as well as an Emmy for a Boston children’s show. She is also the singing voice of Princess Jasmine in Disney’s “Aladdin, the Return of Jafar.”

Together, they are extraordinary, with the best-blending sibling sound since the Everly Brothers, or, perhaps, the Roches. But what makes their musical presentation even more striking is the subtlety of Ann Hampton Callaway’s jazz-tinged harmony lines, which brought intense coloration to everything they sang together. In a gorgeous rendering of “The Sweetest Sounds,” Ann Callaway’s voice roved around her sister’s statement of the melody with a moving, harmonic complexity that would have made a stunning jazz instrumental line--fascinating musically and, of course, a perfect expression of the song’s lyrics.

The show plays on the sisterly connections with a stream of patter about rivalry, friendship, love and past memories. It’s all done with split-second timing and choreography, and never to the point of excess. Wisely, the sisters pace the entire performance around their unerring musicality.

Ann Hampton Callaway’s jazz-based style underscored a lovely, touching combination of “My Buddy” and “Old Friend.” And Liz Callaway’s dramatic soprano produced revelatory readings of “Meadowlark” and “My Heart Is So Full of You.”

But the highlight of the set was the sisters’ “Huge Medley,” designed to include all the material suggested to them when they announced they were doing a show together. The obvious choices are present--”Sisters” and “Bosom Buddies,” but there also were excerpts from “West Side Story” and “Miss Saigon,” a rousing disco romp through “Enough Is Enough” and a climactic “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

The latter was an appropriate closer for a show that revitalizes the cabaret/nightclub format.

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“Sibling Revelry” with Ann Hampton Callaway and Liz Callaway in the Cinegrill in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, 7000 Hollywood Blvd., tonight through Saturday at 8 p.m. On Friday there is an after-theater show at 11:15 p.m., and on Saturday there is a second show at 10 p.m. $15 cover through Friday, $20 Saturday, with $10-per-person minimum. (213) 466-7000.